Thursday, 22 March 2012
Dust Devils on Mars
Here’s a neat little video where they took a photograph from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and re-constructed it into a 3D image of an enormous dust devil on Mars:
An interesting thing about Mars is that because its atmosphere is so thin and its gravity so low, huge dust devils form rather easily. But for the same reasons enormous dust devils like these are also exceptionally weak; they couldn’t really do much more damage than a regular-sized dust devil here on good ol’ Earf. In fact, dust devils are claimed to be responsible for fixing two Mars rovers (by blowing all the dust off their solar cells).
What’s that you say? Cite my sources? Frak, dude, I don’t remember where I read that. Heck, maybe I’m mis-remembering something I read years ago. But it sound right, don’t it?
